Tag Archives: fitness

We may have to reevaluate whether Saccharomyces cerevisiae alone is the species used to brew beer. A paper from Gonzalez et al describes results from PCR–RFLP comparison of 24 brewing strains identifies evidence for S. cerevisiae x S. kudriavzevii hybrids. Although this hybridization is not unprecedented, most seem to be related to cultivated brewing or fermentation strains. It seems that the hybrids are better able to cope with the stress associated with fermentation process.

It seems these would also be a great test system for more whole genome sequencing or at least more polymorphism comparisons to try and determine the proportion of the genome that comes from different parents and estimate timing and frequency of hybridization. It seems possible that the hybridizations are occurring multiple times in nature so are the same regions from each parental genome kept in the hybrid offspring that are selected for fitness under fermentation stress?

Dettman, Anderson, and Kohn recently published a paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology on reproductive experimental evolution in two Neurospora crassa populations evolved under different selective conditions. This is a great study that complements work published last year in Nature on experimental evolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations. Neurospora populations were evolved under high salt and low temperature and were started from either high diversity (interspecific crosses, N. crassa vs N. intermedia) or low diversity (intraspecific cross, two N. crassa isolates D143 (Louisiana, USA)and D69 (Ivory Coast)) as described in Figure 1. The experimentally evolved populations were then tested for asexual and sexual fitness (they were taken through complete meiotic cycle throughout the experiment to avoid insure there was selection on the sexual reproduction pathway.